Arne Slot has received some advice from a former Liverpool player ahead of his first season in charge of the club.
The 45-year-old began his tenure as the Reds’ new head coach at the start of June, taking the reins from the legendary Jurgen Klopp. It marks his maiden campaign in English football after forging a fine reputation in his native Netherlands, with his former Feyenoord assistant Sipke Hulshof likely to follow him to Merseyside.
Jan Kromkamp, who made just 18 appearances for LFC in eight months at Anfield, had a message for his compatriot during an interview with Omrop Fryslan.
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The 43-year-old said: “The English press can be harsh, but you really shouldn’t worry about that. They just have to fill a newspaper every day and so they always come up with something. If I were in the shoes of Hulshof and Slot, I would just focus on the group. Then it will be fine.”
“Of course you have a performance culture, but you also have that at Feyenoord. Slot even built a champion team there and did a great job, so I don’t know why that wouldn’t be possible at Liverpool.”
Slot will face greater demands and far more scrutiny during his time with Liverpool than at any other point in his career, with the Reds one of the most prominent clubs in the most-watched domestic league in world football.
Should he endure a slow start to life at Anfield, comparisons to Klopp will inevitably arise among pundits in England, but Kromkamp is right in telling him to block out any such noise.
The 45-year-old has already been a success at one of the biggest teams in his homeland, and while the expectations of managing LFC are different from Feyenoord, leading the Rotterdam outfit is still a highly pressurised job when you consider the club’s history and the raucousness of their fan base.
Slot will surely have realised prior to joining Liverpool that the spotlight will be on him all the time, and that he’ll inevitably be judged in relation to his predecessor’s work. If that responsibility scared him, we wouldn’t now be talking about him as our new head coach.
If a man of Michael Edwards’ shrewd judgement has full confidence in the Dutchman to lead the Reds into a new era, then we can have every faith that he’ll turn out to be the right man to follow in Klopp’s footsteps.
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